Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

Tony Hawk skates to the 360 launch, but is he stuck with his old-school tricks?

With what is essentially the third "reinvention" of the series, Pro Skater being the first and Underground being second, Tony Hawk's American Wasteland sees the series shy away from the unfettered destruction focus of the last two games and head back to its pure skateboarding roots. In fact, the game's story mode is based around old-school skaters, building a skatepark from the ground up and basically earning everything from scratch.

360 Degrees of TonyLet's go ahead and get the Xbox 360 specifics out of the way. The first thing you should know is that, as its name would suggest, this is the exact same game that you'll find on the Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. Unlike what happened when Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 was designed for the PS2, and the PSOne release was a massively stripped-down version of the PS2 game, the game's content is identical across both console generations.

The level layouts are exactly the same, which is fine because they're pretty good. The geometric detail that makes up said levels is identical as well, so even though the game is on a much more powerful system on the Xbox 360, you're still working with the same amount of raw polygon data.

The only real upgrades you'll see in the game at all, content or graphics-wise, are better textures, a subtle bit of normal mapping and a tad bit better lighting effects. The most obvious difference is the resolution of the textures. We're not saying they're as detailed as some other games we'll see on the system, but there's a pretty reasonable difference between, say, the original Xbox and Xbox 360 versions. The street texture for one looks quite a bit better, and you'll notice that ramps and sidewalks have more defined cracks and joints. The subtle bit of normal mapping is best seen on the skaters, where you can make out pants pockets, shirt wrinkles and those sorts of details. Again, it's subtle, but it's nice. You'll also see what looks like a bit of normal mapping happening on some of the ramps and such in the game, like bricks for instance, but the effect is so minor that it's hard to make out whether it's an advanced lighting technique or just nice texture work.

Aside from that, the Xbox 360 version of Tony Hawk's American Wasteland is basically identical to the other console versions. Cutscene animations still have the slightly jittery current-gen look, the pedestrians and characters in general still have plenty of hard polygon geometry to be noticed, etc. etc. The game does run very, very smooth, and the Xbox 360 controller works wonderfully for the game, almost as well as a Dual Shock 2 even. The point though is that if you already have a copy of THAW, this probably isn't worth the upgrade price for you. If you don't, then this is easily the version to get.

Fight for Your Right to SkateThough every other game in the series has allowed you to take a created character into the main story mode, American Wasteland starts you with a selection of one of five characters, and takes you into LA to begin a hopefully progressive skating career. After meeting Mindy, who basically becomes your tutor and guide of sorts for the rest of the game, the first two tasks that you're required to do are to get a new haircut and pick out some new clothes. You can also wander into the local skateshop to pick out a new deck, but you'll need to wait until you're a bit further in the game to come across accessory stores (for sunglasses, backpacks and such) or tattoo parlors.

While you can essentially outfit your character anyway you want over time, being as you're forced to pick from one of five character choices at the start of the game and then modify them as the game goes on, you're not given the same amount of control over your character's look as you've had in the past. The Tony Hawk series has always had a really good character creator so it's somewhat disappointing that you can't take advantage of it for the Story mode. You can use your fully original characters in the Free Skate and Classic modes of course, just not in the Story mode.

At any rate, the main drive behind the game is your relationship with a group of local LA skaters, its leader, who happens to be a skating legend, and their running ground called Skate Ranch. Much of the game's goals revolve around either directly helping this group of characters in some way or earning pieces for Skate Ranch.

When you first arrive at the ranch, it looks something like a rundown skatepark built on a landfill. A fair bit of the game's main story goals revolve around collecting various objects, big and small, from the sections of LA in order to outfit Skate Ranch proper. You'll collect things like dinosaur heads, broken sections of the street, pieces of hangers and so forth. It's kind of a cool progression in that if you continuously visit it throughout the game, you'll essentially be able to skate on the progress you've made.

The end result of Skate Ranch is that it turns into somewhat of a littered skatepark, but one with a whole slew of different ramps, rails to hit and so on and so forth. If you take your sweet time in returning to the ranch after you've collected a bunch of stuff, the place may seem rather foreign and may actually be reasonably hard to navigate as you won't really know how it's laid out anymore. Skate Ranch is a cool addition to the series, and something of an idea that might be cool in future titles, especially if you could place the collected pieces where you want, like in the Park Editor.

As a whole, the story, attitude and overall focus of the game is much better this time around than what we've seen from the two THUG games. The series' return to the purer elements of skateboarding is a welcome one, and being as there are very few missions that don't require a skateboard, this is what we like to see.